Showing posts with label dotnet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dotnet. Show all posts

Recap / Summary of the week #29

Every Friday, I will share a recap of the week and at the same time a summary of my streams. Those videos are at least two hour longs, so I thought a short summary to know if topic interest you could be useful.


Useful Links:


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Recap / Summary of the week #28

This is some basic, sample markdown. Every Friday, starting now, I will share a recap of the week and at the same time a summary of my streams. Those videos are at least two hour longs, so I thought a short summary to know if topic interest you could be useful.


Useful Links:


~☁️

Reading Notes #433

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud


Programming


Podcast


Miscellaneous


Reading Notes #432


Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!


Cloud


Programming


Podcasts


Books

Add caption
Title: Badass: Making Users Awesome 

Author: Kathy Sierra 

ISBN: 9781491919019

I took me about one year to read that book. Way longer then it should. It was a good book and it is really easy to read. Maybe it's the fact that it was a "real" book and not in my kindle? But I think it was the format. This book look like a comic book with a director cut. There those little story bubbles and there is the text. The content is amazing, but I felt like I was always losing the vibe while transitioning to the text, or the bubbles. 

However, the book is really great

Reading Notes #429

Suggestion of the week


Cloud


Programming

  • Remote Debugging .NET Containers (Karol Deland) - A nice tutorial that explains clearly first the difference between remote and local debugging and then explains how to do it.

Podcast


Miscellaneous

  • Screen Sharing with an Ultrawide Monitor (Kenny Lowe) - Really interesting post.As I think about getting a new screen and heard bad experiences sharing ultrawide screens this look like a nice solution.

Book


Vlog Like a Boss - How to Kill It Online with Video Blogging

Author: Amy Schmittauer Landino

An interesting book that shares the best practices about making videos today. How to plan, record, edit... What to do and not do. A quick, direct to the point and complete tutorial to get started. This book was done like today's videos.







~enjoy.

Reading Notes #428


Frank in Kayak smilling at the camera
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud


Programming


Miscellaneous

  • APIs in the 2020s Panel (.NET Rocks!) - A virtual panel of awesome speakers that talked about API, REST, GraphQL, oData and so more. Lovely episode.
  • 471: How to Say No Without Saying No, with Lois Frankel (Coaching for Leaders) - Saying No... being open. Really interesting topic. I put Lois Frankel: Nice Girls Don’t Speak Up or Stand Out in my to read list, that book maybe written for women in mind, but I think it is really interesting.
  • Leveraging Our Emotional Goals (Developer Tea) - An interesting episode that talk about goals and what we need to do (or not) to achieved them.
  • 203: Updating Open Source Projects (https://castbox.fm/episode/203%3A-Updating-Open-Source-Projects-id2117504-id267802246) - As I just create my first version in one of my open-source project I found the topic more than interesting... Thank you, great show.

Miscellaneous


Books

Cover of the Book The Impossible first.
  The Impossible First: From Fire to Ice—Crossing Antarctica Alone

  Author: Colin O'Brady

  An incredible adventure yes around the globe, but more important over the personal limits. I found this book very inspiring. I felt following him across the Antarctica... In the blizzard or in those deep moment. Great memoir, great adventure.





~enjoy!

 

Reading Notes #427

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. As you will quickly see This week is heavily tinted by the Microsoft Build event. I still have tons of videos to watch since I was was busy monitoring the chat during most of the performances.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud


Programming


Podcast

  • Chocolatey with Rob Reynolds (.NET Rocks!) - Awesome episode talking about all the good and the great of Chocolatey that awesome package manager.

Miscellaneous


~enjoy!

Reading Notes #426

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. You think you may have interesting content, share it!


Cloud

Programming


Podcasts

  • 5 Reasons It's Better to Be A Small Streamer - Twitch Tips (Stream Coach: Twitch Stream Tips | Partner Interviews | Pro Advice) - A nice episode that list some advantages of being a smaller streamer. I've been streaming for one year now, I'm pretty happy with my journey, learned a lot, and still learn so much. I don't feel disadvantaged, but that's maybe just because I don't really focus on growth.
  • 469: See What Really Matters, with Greg McKeown (Coaching for Leaders) - Nice episode that talks about the essential, how to find it, how to not pass over it. Very interesting. The book, Essentialism, from seems interesting too... And hop! On the to-read list.

Miscellaneous

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Reading Notes #424


Suggestion of the week

Cloud

Programming

Podcasts

Miscellaneous

  • Visual Studio Codespaces (Nik Molnar) - I really like the new name I think it says more about what it is. And seriously how can I not like the new price! Less than 2$/day for a machine!

Reading Notes #423

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. You think you may have an interesting post, share it!
My office is in the basement... so I didn't conplained.

Cloud

Programming

Podcasts

Miscellaneous


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Reading Notes #417


Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.
It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
Enjoy!


Cloud

Programming

Podcast

Miscellaneous


~


Reading Notes #415


Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.



Cloud

Programming

Miscellaneous

  • What are Azure CLI Extensions? (Michael Crump) - An interesting first article of a series. This one introduces us to the extension... Hmmm. I think I have an idea.
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Reading Notes #413


Cloud

Programming

Miscellaneous

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Reading Notes #412




Every Monday, I share my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.


Cloud

Programming

Podcasts

  • #25: Shayne Boyer - Social Coder (The Solo Coder Podcast) - Once again a very nice episode. It was wonderful to discover my colleague to this interview. Well done.

Miscellaneous





Reading Notes #410


Every Monday, I share my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

Programming

Databases

Podcast

  • Myself: It's not weird at all (Hanselminutes - Fresh Talk and Tech for Developers) - I nice episode much longer than the usual, but the guest is also special... It's Scott. During a Live Stream on Twitch it the Live Coders... People suggest making a podcast episode of the interview... I couldn't agree more.
  • The Power of Humor in Tech with Chloe Condon (Screaming in the Cloud) - Very refreshing episode with the awesome and very colorful Chloe. Nice show that goes to fast. Very interesting discussion about the non-traditional way to technical work, and its success.

Deploy to Azure Directly From the Repository with GitHub Actions


You hear about that new GitHub Actions. Or maybe you didn't but would like to add a continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI-CD) to your web application. In this post, I will show you how to add a CI-CD to deploy automatically to Azure using the GitHub Actions.

What are GitHub Actions


GitHub Actions are automated workflows to do things. One of these could be a CI-CD. Using a workflow you could decide to compile and execute some unit tests at every push or pull request (PR). Another workflow could be that you deploy that application.

In this article, I will deploy a .Net Core application in Azure. However, you can use any languages you would like and deploy anywhere you like... I just needed to pick one :)

Now, let's get started.

Step 1 - The Code.


We need some code in a GitHub repo. Create a GitHub repo, clone it locally. And your app in it. I created mine with dotnet new blazorserver -n cloud5minsdemo -o src. Then commit and push.

Step 2 - Define the workflow


We got the code, now it's time to define our workflow. I will be providing all the code snippets required for the scenario cover in this post, but there is tons of template ready to be used available directly from your GitHub repository! Let's have a look. From your repository click on the Action tab, and voila!


When I wrote this post, a lot of available templates assumed the Azure resources already existed and you and adding a CI-CD to the mixt to automated your deployment. It's great but in my case, I was building a brand new web site so those didn't fit my needs. This is why I created my own template. The workflow I created was inspired by Azure/webapps-deploy. And there a lot of information also available on Deploy to App Service using GitHub Actions.

Let's add our template to our solution. GitHub will look in the folder .github/workflows/ from the root of the repository. Then create a file with the extension .yml

Here the code for my dotnet.yml, as any YAML file the secret is in the indentation as it is whitespace sensitive:

on: [push,pull_request]

env:
  AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME: cloud5minsdemo   # set this to your application's name
  AZURE_GROUP_NAME: cloud5mins2

jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:

    # checkout the repo
    - uses: actions/checkout@master
    
    - name: Setup .NET Core
      uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
      with:
        dotnet-version:  3.0.101


    # dotnet build and publish
    - name: Build with dotnet
      run: dotnet build ./src --configuration Release
    - name: dotnet publish 
      run: |
        dotnet publish ./src -c Release -o myapp 

    - uses: azure/login@v1
      with:
        creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}

    - run: |
        az group create -n ${{ env.AZURE_GROUP_NAME }} -l eastus 
        az group deployment create -n ghaction -g ${{ env.AZURE_GROUP_NAME }} --template-file deployment/azuredepoy.json


    # deploy web app using Azure credentials
    - name: 'Azure webapp deploy'
      uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v1
      with:
        app-name: ${{ env.AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME }}
        package: './myapp' 

    # Azure logout 
    - name: logout
      run: |
        az logout


The Agent


There is a lot in there let's start by the first line. The on: is to define the trigger, in this case, the workflow will be trigger at every push or PR.

The env: is where you can declare variables. It's totally optional, but I think it will help then templates are more complex or simply to reuse them easily.

Then comes the jobs: definition. In this case, we will use the latest version of Ubuntu as our build agent. Of course, in a production environment, you should be more specify and select the OS that matches your needs. This job will have multiples steps defined in the, you guess it, steps: section/

We specify a branch to work with and set up our agent by:

uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
with:
  dotnet-version: 3.0.101

This is because I have a .Net Core project. For Node.js project, it would be

uses: actions/setup-node@v1
with:
  node-version: 10.x

And it would be a better idea to set the version as an environment variable to be able to change it quickly.

The next two instructions are really .Net Core focus as they will build and package the application into a folder myapp. Of course, in the "section" you could execute some unit test or any other validation that you may find useful.

The next section may be less obvious.

- uses: azure/login@v1
  with:
    creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}

Access and Secrets


To have our GitHub Action to be able to create resources and deploy the code it needs to have access. The azure/login@v1 will let the Action login, using a Service Principal. In other words, we will create an authentication in the Azure Active Directory, with enough permission to do what we need.

Let's examine the following Azure CLI command:

`az ad sp create-for-rbac --name "c5m-Frankdemo" --role contributor --scopes /subscriptions/{subscription-id} --sdk-auth`

This will create a Service Principal named "c5m-Frankdemo" with the role "contributor" on the subscription specified. The role contributor can do mostly anything except granting permission.

Because no resources already existed the GitHub Action will require more permission. If you create the Resource Group outside of the CI-CD, you could limit the access only to this specific resource group. Using this command instead:

`az ad sp create-for-rbac --name "c5m-Frankdemo" --role contributor --scopes /subscriptions/{subscription-id}/resourceGroups/{resource-group} --sdk-auth`

The Azure CLI command will return a JSON. We will copy-paste this JSON into a GitHub secret. GitHub secrets encrypted secrets and allow you to store sensitive information, such as access tokens, in your repository. To access them go in the Settings of the repository and select Secrets from the left menu.


Click the Add a new secret button, and type AZURE_CREDENTIALS as the name. It could be anything, as long as you use that value in the YAML file describing the workflow. Put the JSON including the curly brackets in the Value textbox and click the save button.

Provisioning the Azure Resources


Now that the workflow has access we could execute some Azure CLI commands, but let's see what missing:

- run: |
    az group create -n ${{ env.AZURE_GROUP_NAME }} -l eastus 
    az group deployment create -n ghaction -g ${{ env.AZURE_GROUP_NAME }} --template-file deployment/azuredepoy.json --parameters myWebAppName=${{ env.AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME }}

The first command will create an Azure Resource Group, where all the resources will be created. The second one will deploy the website using an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. The --template-file deployment/azuredepoy.json tells us the template is a file named azuredeploy.json located in the folder deployment. Notice that the application name is passed to a parameter myWebAppName, using the environment variable.

An ARM template is simply a flat file that a lot like a JSON document. Use can use any text editor, I like doing mine with Visual Studio Code and two extensions: Azure Resource Manager Snippets, and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Tools With those tools I can build ARM template very efficiently. For this template, we need a service plane and a web App. Here what the template looks like.

{
    "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",
    "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
    "parameters": {
        "myWebAppName": {
           "type": "string",
           "metadata": {
                "description": "WebAppName"
            }
        }
    },
    "variables": {},
    "resources": [
        {
            "name": "[parameters('myWebAppName')]",
            "type": "Microsoft.Web/sites",
            "apiVersion": "2016-08-01",
            "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
            "tags": {
                "[concat('hidden-related:', resourceGroup().id, '/providers/Microsoft.Web/serverfarms/frankdemoplan')]": "Resource",
                "displayName": "[parameters('myWebAppName')]"
            },
            "dependsOn": [
                "[resourceId('Microsoft.Web/serverfarms', 'frankdemoplan')]"
            ],
            "properties": {
                "name": "[parameters('myWebAppName')]",
                "serverFarmId": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Web/serverfarms', 'frankdemoplan')]"
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "frankdemoplan",
            "type": "Microsoft.Web/serverfarms",
            "apiVersion": "2018-02-01",
            "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
            "sku": {
                "name": "F1",
                "capacity": 1
            },
            "tags": {
                "displayName": "frankdemoplan"
            },
            "properties": {
                "name": "frankdemoplan"
            }
        }
    ],
    "outputs": {},
    "functions": []
}

This template is simple, it only contains the two required resources: a service plan, and a web app. To learn more about the ARM Template you can read my other post or check out this excellent introduction in the documentation.

Once the template is created and saved in its folder.

The deployment


There are only two last steps to the YAML file: the deployment and logout. Let's have a quick look at the deployment.

# deploy web app using Azure credentials
- name: 'Azure webapp deploy'
  uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v1
  with:
    app-name: ${{ env.AZURE_WEBAPP_NAME }}
    package: './myapp' 


Now that we are sure the resources exist in Azure we can deploy the code. This will be done with azure/webapps-deploy@v1 that will take the package generated by dotnet into myapp. Since we are already authenticated there is no need to specify anything at this point.

Everything is ready for the deployment. You just need to commit and push (into master) and the GitHub Action will be triggered. You can follow the deployment by going into the Actions tab.



After a few minutes, the website should be available in Azure. This post only shows a very simple build and deployment, but you can do so many things with those GitHub Actions, like executing tasks or packaging a container... I would love to know how you use them. Leave a comment or reach out on social media.


If you prefer, I also did a video of this post:



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Reading Notes #404



Every week, I publish my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I was looking for.

Cloud



Programming


Podcasts


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Reading Notes #403



Every week, I publish my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I was looking for.

I passed the 4k subscribers mark on YouTube

The suggestion of the week


Cloud


Programming

  • ASP.NET Core updates in .NET Core 3.1 (Sourabh Shirhatti) - I'm very excited about this 3.1 version.I'm not sure why maybe it's because it is the long-time support (LTS). Nevertheless, I will update all my projects.

Miscellaneous

  • 7 Dangers of Micromanagement ( Jack Wallen) - Nice post to help you give the best version of yourself. (Note it's now 6, but it was 7 when I read it)

Books


Build Your Dream Stream

Ashley

Great book with many very interesting ideas.Not the same things that we ear elsewhere, or if it is, it's in very different words.








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Reading Notes #402

Every week, I publish my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I was looking for.

Cloud

Programming

Miscellaneous

Books

The Art of Thinking Clearly

by Rolf Dobelli

I'm still balanced about this book. It was a good book, even if I found some chapters that were too long. I also got lost by moments. I had the impression that some thoughts or ideas were not developed correctly and more quickly wrapped. In counterpart, some were very well served and clear.

Reading Notes #399

Cloud

  • Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2019 Q4 (Gloridel Morales) - Since the multi-stage pipeline launch in May, the team as been listening to his community. In this post learn more about what they have been working on and what is their roadmap.

Programming

  • Code Comments (Donn Felker) - Very smart idea! I'm staring using that rule right away.
  • Microservices Fundamentals (Mark Heath) - New course on Pluralsight about an indeed challenging topic. This post shares the plan of that Microservices course.
  • Stop Waiting! Start using Async and Await! (Simon Hawe) - Learn the power of async in this excellent post. The example may be in Python the idea is the same however language we are using.

Miscellaneous


Books

Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, And Build a Successful Business

Author: Pat Flynn

I really like this book, and planning to read it again soon. I like the way things are simply explained. Like if you deconstructed a situation and then re-building it. It felt authentic and true. It's nothing transcending, but the way it is explained is great.




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